SHE NEEDS TO BE FREE

• Today's suggested practice: Ten minutes of feeling into the space of Her yearning (your yearning)...(see below)

• My playlist while writing today's meditation: Messiaen, Quartet for the End of the World 

• My morning practice: 90 minutes, warm-up for legs and lower triangle, followed by Kriya to Know the Other as Myself (mantra and mudra), Linking to the Infinite (pranayama and mantra)

• My vulnerability practice: Feel into her vulnerability and know that I am both strong enough and vulnerable enough myself to hold her safe to softly, whimsically bloom, as she will, where she will...

—Hans Peter Meyer

MY MEDITATION

How do I limit the limitless flow of nourishment that is the divine feminine in my life?

How do I invite chaos and unhappiness, ugliness and dis-ease?

Every man should ask himself this question, daily. And every woman too. Neglecting to hold space for the love and beauty that yearns to flow in our bodies and our lives...

"I'm moving across the country. For three months. Maybe more. I don't know," she said from across the room, watching me holding her gaze. And then, after a pause, "Are you sad?" I laughed.

No, not sad, I said. Happy that you are moving from your stuck place. Happy that you are excited to be in movement. Happy that you will be dancing for those months and more.

It doesn't matter where you are or what you do, I continued, I am still here. I hold this space. I love you.

The unexpected time together slipped into hours. Tea. Then her tears. Endlessly flowing. Long stretches of tender silence, her opening into deeper and deeper vulnerability, telling me of her need to be held without words spoken, held in my gaze and my listening. So much trust blossoming so gently in her body, her eyes.... And me, feeling so at ease in this testing, this offering.

This relationship, I said, is obviously not about being together in any conventional way. It is, for me, about learning to love beyond distance. To hold my heart open. To hold you, I said, to hold this space. To be nourished by the flow of you as you become yourself.

To live this art I need to practice. Daily. My neediness and my fear, a constant test of my depth and my capacities to hold this space. I reset and recondition my nervous system. The strange and unknown is transformed. No longer a threat but a novel and richer form of nourishment, inspiration to go even deeper with myself. To become even more skilled at receiving even more and stranger treasures and learning to trust myself to make art of it all.

Am I sad? No, I said. I am grateful that my beloved is expressing her whimsy, that she enriches the distance between us into something more beautiful than geography, beyond proximity. Loving this solitude, and yet yearning to know more of her tenderness.

A beautiful dance... to experience her tests, not as threats, but as moments where I relax into my art.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀Tuning into another's needs is a skill --it is a meditation of feeling awareness that requires you to expand beyond self and feel into another body and heart. Like any artform, it takes intention, commitment, and practice. Not to mention a willingness to fail and course correct. (John Wineland, excerpt from his new book, From the Core: A New Masculine Paradigm for Leading with Love, Living Your Truth, and Healing the World.)

🌀Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. (Erich Fromm)

🌀The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust....

But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. ( Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

🌀You're not like that now. (She Who Must Be Held, My Oracle)

TODAY'S SUGGESTED PRACTICE

Ten minutes of feeling into the space of Her yearning (your yearning)...

Please read through first, then ...

• Set a timer for 10 minutes...

• Your eyes are open, looking with soft focus into the distance, taking it all in, all 180 degrees of your peripheral vision...

• You are standing tall with your feet planted into to the earth, your chin tucked and gently opening your heart centre to receive all that your vision and your breath bring to you...

• You are breathing without effort, but consciously inhaling through your nose and into your throat and down through your heart centre, into your belly, and below. You are exhaling up the front of your body, feeling the flow up through and softening your genitals, your belly, your heart, your throat, the front of your face. Everything is softening, as your spine remains firm, not rigid, literally holding the space for your body's softening.

• Bring your full awareness to your heart. Allow yourself to focus on something you want, someone you desire, some yearning for tenderness or strength or opening or closing — something that is beyond you.

• Now move forward, and back. Begin to sway like tall slender trees in the wind, like eel grass in the tides, like kelp in the ocean currents. Rooted, and swaying. Grounded, and dancing.

• Gently move your hips, your torso, your shoulders — imagine the tide or the wind or the ocean currents moving you, moving your yearning. Allow your arms to move, your head to move. You are now in motion, stepping to some invisible and unheard rhythm that is your yearning.

• Feel from your heart into your belly, your genitals, deep into your perineum, your root. Feel this yearning as movement in your body pulsing down from your heart, up from your root. Feel the sensations of trust and love and desire and safety that you can imagine; feel the feelings of love and trust and safety and desire as sensations you have never imagined; be the artist of feeling and sensation; inspire yourself to feel more than you've ever felt; express this as motion, even as sound from your throat if that is appropriate in this place, this moment.

• Feel this pulsing moving up from your heart into your throat, into the words and sounds you long to say, long to hear, long to imagine. Allow sighs and whispers (and shouts if appropriate) to come forth from some deep, unknown place. All of it moving, all of it vibrating through your body, from your toes and ankles to your ears and the crown of your head. This doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be subtle. Let it be how it is in this moment, for you. Feel Her, the divine feminine that all of us play host to in our bodies and minds and beyond. Feel Her and give Her freedom She may have never known in your body, in your mind. Let Her dance!

• As the timer signals, slowly release Her. Let the echoes of Her vibrations, Her yearnings, move through your body and your mind. Hold yourself steady. Feel your feet on the ground. Know that you are enough for all She brings. Bring this moment of clarity and confidence into everything you do or say today. This is your gift, to know yourself capable of such artistry, such flow, and such strength and stability. Now, step back into the flow of your day. You are the artist of this day, make it the work of art you need, the world needs.